Mr. Hornaday's War (26 page)

Verner brought Benga, seven other pygmies, and a young Congolese man to St. Louis, having promised to return the eight pygmies to their African homes when the fair ended. The nine Africans proved to be one of the most popular attractions at the fair, where the crowds
gawked, jeered, and at one point threw mud pies. Visitors were especially eager to see Benga's teeth, which had been filed to sharp points in his early youth. Verner and others encouraged the impression that this crude cosmetic dentistry had been carried out because Benga was a cannibal—in fact, the “only genuine African cannibal in America,” according to one newspaper account. Benga learned to charge a nickel for showing visitors his terrible teeth. At one point, visitors to the fair got so excited by the sight of this “man-eating savage” that the First Illinois Regiment had to be called to control the mob.
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From St. Louis, Ota Benga and the eight other Africans traveled with Verner to New Orleans just in time for Mardi Gras, before finally returning to Africa. Benga briefly lived among his old tribe, the Batwa, but increasingly he seemed to feel alienated and uncomfortable even among his own people. Benga married a Batwa woman, but she died of snakebite. Eventually, when Verner returned to America, Ota Benga asked to go with him (according to Verner's account, he actually threatened to drown himself if he was not permitted to go).
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Samuel Verner, with his stiff collars, his preening pomposity, and his puffed-up resume, arrived in New York in August 1906, with the small African “cannibal” Ota Benga. The two of them seemed to have developed a genuine friendship. Benga called Verner by the African name Fwela. But by then Verner was growing increasingly desperate about his own personal financial situation, and he arranged for Benga to stay in a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City so that he could begin negotiating with the museum's curator, Henry Bumpus, over the acquisition of Verner's spoils from Africa, which included everything from a gigantic beetle to a chimpanzee. (Verner also asked for a job, but Bumpus, skeptical of his credentials, turned him down. Eventually Verner—the great explorer—found a job as a night-shift ticket-taker on the subway, scribbling articles about Africa when work was slow.)
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Benga seemed to enjoy his stay at the museum, sometimes wandering around the grounds wearing a bark loincloth to entertain visitors. But eventually he began to grow homesick for his African homeland—even though, by now, he did not quite belong there, either. Samuel Verner began looking for a more permanent place for Benga to live, and he finally brought him to the New York Zoological Park, where William Temple Hornaday was now the imperious and well-known director. Hornaday agreed to buy the chimpanzee from
Verner for $275, and also agreed to let Ota stay at the zoo temporarily. The agreement between the two men was that Ota “belonged” to Verner, who could return and take him back at any time.
33

Hornaday, like Verner, seems to have genuinely liked the little African, who stood just under five feet tall though he was fully grown. He welcomed him to the zoo and, at first, he simply let him walk the grounds (usually wearing Western clothes), encouraging the keepers to allow Ota access to many of the animals. Ota grew especially fond of an orangutan named Dohong, “the presiding genius of the Monkey House,” who had been taught to ride a tricycle, wear pants and a shirt, and eat with a knife and fork. (Dohong's antics made it clear that the distinction between a “zoo” and a “circus” was not entirely clear in those days.) The zookeepers opened Dohong's cage doors whenever Ota wished, and they encouraged Ota to set up his hammock in an adjoining, empty Monkey House cage that was shared by the orang and several chimps. The keepers set up a target made of straw in the cage, gave Ota his bow and arrows, and encouraged him to try a bit of target practice.
34

In other words, Ota's transit from outside to inside the cage was such a stealthy, seemingly casual progression that later Hornaday and everyone else involved could maintain that it wasn't even deliberately planned. (In his private letters to Josephine, there is a passing suggestion that this exhibit might even have been years in the making. In a letter dated May 27, 1902, on New York Zoological Society letterhead, Hornaday wrote: “To speak first of important things. . . . I will tell you that the hunt for a dusky maiden of Congolese ancestry has just been begun.”)
35

Yet Ota Benga's confinement had been foreshadowed, not just in Professor Osborn's comments about “an Indian in a teepee” at the zoo's opening ceremonies, but in something Hornaday had written ten years earlier. He had imagined what he conceived of as the “ultimate” zoo exhibit—the pseudoscientific display of “American aborigines” in their natural habitat. It would be both educational and unforgettable,
“at once
getting hold of the Public,” by “illustrating the house life of aborigines of North America.” Such an exhibit could “be made a very picturesque, striking, and popular feature, at very moderate cost; and it would be ‘something new under the sun.'” Left unsaid was the presumption that an exhibit like that would require real, living aborigines to be kept in some kind of confinement. Despite Hornaday's disdain
for the cheap theatrics of P. T. Barnum, Barnum would have loved it.

Pleased by this new, if temporary, acquisition, Hornaday wrote a short article for the
Zoological Society Bulletin
called “An African Pigmy,” with a photo on the front page of Ota holding a chimp named Polly. “On September 9, a genuine African pigmy, belonging to the sub-race commonly miscalled ‘dwarfs,' was employed in the Zoological Park,” he began in a dispassionate, scientific-sounding way. A handwritten version of the piece describes the pygmies as “the smallest racial division of the human genus, and probably the lowest in cultural development,” but Hornaday struck these lines from the published piece.
36

In fact, Ota Benga had become an “employee” of the zoo several days earlier, and the press had quickly gotten wind of this. On Saturday, September 8, 1906, the first headline appeared, in the
New York Times:
“Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.”
37
The story explained that the tiny “Bushman,” wearing nothing but a bark loincloth and accompanied by an orangutan named Dohong, was locked in the cage except when his keeper let him out, and that throngs of curiosity-seekers had begun to crowd around his enclosure. “Ist dass ein Mensch?” asked one German visitor. “Is it a man?”
38
The exhibit “had for many visitors more than a provocation to laughter,” the
Times
reported. “There were laughs enough in it too, but there was something about it which made the serious-minded grave.”
39

The next day, Sunday, September 9, Director Hornaday had a sign installed outside the enclosure at the Monkey House:

The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.”

Age, 28 years.

Height, 4 feet 11 inches.

Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State,

South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner

Weight 103 pounds

Exhibited each afternoon during September.
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The sign was meant to be subdued, scientific, and nonjudgmental, like every other sign in the park, but by now Hornaday found he had a mob scene on his hands. Having read in the papers about the “pygmy in the zoo”—or, better yet, the “cannibal in the zoo”—thousands had made their way out to the Bronx to see him for themselves.
“The Bushman didn't seem to mind it, and the sight plainly pleased the crowd,” the
Times
reported that day. “Few expressed audible objection to the sight of a human being in a cage. There was always a crowd before the cage, most of the time roaring with laughter, and from almost every corner of the garden could be heard the question:

‘Where is the Pygmy?'

And the answer was, ‘In the monkey house.'”
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But already there were rumbles of outrage. The Reverend R. S. MacArthur, a white preacher, thundered: “The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African. . . . We send out missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people, and then we bring one here to brutalize him.” That Sunday, a committee of Clergymen from the Colored Baptist Ministers Conference called the exhibit “an outrage” and announced that they would appeal to the mayor of New York, which chartered the zoo, to put a stop to the “degrading exhibition.” The delegation's leader, the Reverend James Gordon, said that “our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”
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But the ministers were angriest about the fact that the exhibit seemed to insinuate that Ota Benga was the “missing link” between apes and humans, thus adding credence to the godless theories of Charles Darwin.

“This is a Christian country . . . and the exhibition evidently aims to be a demonstration of the Darwinian theory of evolution,” Gordon fumed. “The Darwinian theory is absolutely opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted.”

By Monday, September 10, Hornaday waded in, defensive and angry. He seemed hurt that he was being misunderstood. In response to MacArthur's remarks about “brutalizing” Ota Benga, Hornaday said:

This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of. As for the boy being exhibited in a cage, it was done simply for the convenience of the thousands of people who wanted to see him. We have no platform that we could place him on, and this big open air cage was the best place we could find to put him where everybody could see him. Why, we are taking excellent care of the little fellow and he is great favorite with everybody connected with the zoo. He has one of the best rooms in the primate house.
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Not then, nor at any time later in his long life, did Hornaday publicly apologize for the exhibition, nor did he ever quite seem to understand why it could be considered offensive. But as the situation escalated into something akin to a slow-motion riot, Hornaday was the public face of the New York Zoological Society, trying to explain the zoo's intentions and fending off body blows from the public, the press, and the preachers.

The role of Madison Grant in all this was, as usual, a backstage affair. After the preachers were turned away by Mayor George B. McLellan Jr., who refused to help them, they marched into Grant's law office. But when they asked to be given custody of Ota Benga, in order to free him, Grant told them that the zoo was only holding him in trust for Dr. Verner and had no authority to hand him over. This, the preachers said afterwards, was “no satisfactory reply,” although it was perfectly in character for Grant: a muffled “go away” from behind a walnut-paneled door.
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Nevertheless, the next day, Grant ordered that Ota Benga no longer be displayed in a cage, although he was still “employed” by the zoo (as Hornaday put it) and still slept in the primate house at night. But by now the news had spread through the city. On Sunday, September 16, 40,000 people came to the zoo, and, according to the
Times,
“nearly every man, woman, and child of this crowd made for the monkey house to see the star attraction in the park—the wild man from Africa. They chased him about the grounds all day, howling, jeering, and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him.”
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Ota threw a tantrum, tried to bite one keeper, and at one point even brandished a stolen knife. Hornaday, alarmed by all this, tried to contact Verner to get him to take Ota Benga away, complaining that “the boy . . . does quite what he pleases, and it is utterly impossible to control him.”
46

Although Madison Grant may not have been the public face of this affair, his deeper convictions about race were glaringly on display—and would later become well known to the world. He was not just insensitive to the issue of race; some historians would later call him “the nation's most influential racist.”
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To men like Madison Grant, the tidal wave of unkempt immigrants who filled the streets of New York—and now the Beaux-Arts pavillions and gardens of the New York Zoo—was deeply alarming. These people were a threat to his class and, he felt, a danger to the
nation. Grant was a deep believer in the theory of eugenics, a word coined by Darwin's eccentric and erudite half-cousin, Sir Francis Dalton, in 1883. Simply put, eugenics meant the program of improving the human race through controlled breeding, much as horse breeders refine a bloodline of thoroughbreds. The idea caught hold in America and spawned a new generation of “scientific racists” who came to believe that to invigorate humankind, the dominant Teutonic or Nordic races should be selected for breeding, while the weak, the infirm, the feebleminded, and those of degenerate races such as Jews and blacks should either be encouraged not to reproduce or forcibly sterilized. Eugenicists believed that “charity” was misguided because it enabled the weak to survive, therefore diminishing the vigor of the race.
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The most famous book about eugenics to emerge from America, published in 1916, was
The Passing of the Great Race.
Its author was none other than Madison Grant. The book attempted to explain all of Western history in terms of racial theory, showing how great nations crumbled and fell when their strength was sapped by interbreeding with the “mongrel races,” and other nations rose on the majestic power of racial purity. Grant actually argued in his book that Negroes were so much less developed than Nordics that they belonged to a separate species—possibly even a separate subgenera. The book became enormously influential, going through four editions in the United States and many translations, including a translation into German. Years later, at the Nuremberg trials, it emerged that Grant's book had found its way into the hands of Adolf Hitler himself.